"There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I've know such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral---moral---what shall I say?---posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your tables without any real necessity---from habit, from cowardice, from good nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons."

"It was solemn, and a little ridiculous, too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalty of its failure."

"A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person----this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well---the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds."

----- Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad